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How to Make a Convincing SEO Argument to a Business Owner

It’s one thing to have heard about the wonders of SEO and dozens of content marketers on the internet praising what it can do for businesses. But beneath all the terminology they throw out, it’s still hard for many to understand what the big deal with SEO is. So when an SEO professional comes along and makes the necessary changes on a business website, business owners can fall into the trap of believing that SEO is supposed to produce quick and easy results.

They panic and get irritated when their sites aren’t getting a boatload of new leads in a short amount of time. How do you persuade someone like this that SEO is worth it? Take some pointers from this guide, which will allow you to make stronger arguments for convincing businesses and your company to adopt SEO as part of their marketing strategy. This is advice coming from experienced SEO experts who worked on many websites and knew what it takes to produce results.

Step 1: Look at the Situation From the Business Owner’s Perspective

The business owner wants to be sure that SEO is going to be a worthwhile investment. They’ve spent a lot of time developing the business from scratch. The stakes for businesses are so high that many of them close down in the first five years of inception. There’s so much riding on the company to succeed, so when SEO is brought up as a possible lead generation tool, there has to be a way to show the business owner that it’s not something that’s too good to be true.

To first get the business owner off their guard, try presenting some compelling statistics about why SEO is effective when implemented correctly. Present them with facts they can’t possibly ignore like these:

• 80-90% of search engine users ignore the paid ads they see in their searches.• Over 40% of revenue generated by online businesses comes from organic searches.• 4 in 5 people use search engines to find information in their local area.• 51% of website traffic will come from organic search.

These facts are relevant to the business owner because it shows them that SEO might be very profitable. Of course, this is not going to ease all of their concerns, but you have their attention. You can now proceed with the next steps to get them to realize that SEO can be one of their best assets.

Step 2: Teach the Business Owner About Some of the SEO Fundamentals

In this step, you don’t have to get too technical with your explanations. There’s enough confusing terminology and lingo in SEO as it is right now. You don’t want to come in and start getting into terms like “website architecture” or “301 redirects.” What you want to do instead is keep it simple and start with a more relatable concept. Ask the business owner what their favorite local businesses are and start from there.

Ask them how they were able to find some of these businesses in the first place? More likely than not, they typed something into Google looking for a specific service in their town and found that business there. This is part of the reason why SEO is needed for any business that has a website. You can now explain that Google’s always hungry to find sites that are offering precisely what people are looking for.

Step 3: Explain Why You Want to Make Changes and What They Will Do

Here, you’ve probably run a site audit and came to the business owner with a series of issues to fix. Perhaps one of the biggest problems is that there’s a lot of thin content on the site that should be expanded. Expect to get some pushback at the beginning from the business owner wondering how expanding the content would do much good for the website.

Why does this content have to be longer here? Do people really need to learn about X, Y, and Z of a topic? Here, you would explain that Google ranks websites higher when people spend more time on the website. Longer, informative, and useful content keeps users engaged, entertained, and does wonders for the website bounce rates.

For any other SEO change, keep your explanations simple and straightforward. Always emphasize that if this action is performed on the site, it will affect the user experience and therefore have a positive SEO impact. When you explain your reasoning this way, it leaves far less doubt in the business owner’s mind that what you want to do Is in their best interests.

Step 4: Keep the Expectations of the Business Owner Realistic

SEO is never something that should be left in a vacuum. It requires a lot of time, effort, and planning to get right. It should be used in tandem with content marketing, PPC, and social media marketing to produce the best results. Each digital marketing tactic fits together in some way. A problem with many SEO marketers is they fail to understand this dynamic and think that if they do these few things on someone’s site that it’s going to lead to desired results in this timespan.

That’s why you see some SEO companies make outrageous claims about how they can guarantee results in 30 days. The reality is far different, and it all depends on the industry and website you’re working with. It’s also more challenging to perform SEO if the website itself has many problematic technical issues and doesn’t function properly on mobile devices. Sometimes, the website needs a complete overhaul even to begin going forward with an SEO strategy.

When all the right factors are in place, SEO should take anywhere from 6 months to a year to produce results. That is assuming that the website was built with the best UX/UI practices, the website content isn’t stale and keeps people engaged, and that there is an effort to build a brand following. All of these things take time. SEO is another tool to add to a business’s overarching marketing efforts.

While you can’t guarantee instant results, you can reassure the business owner that SEO should be a welcome part of branding the business and reaching new customers. Just don’t ever say that you can get their business website ranked #1 for some keyword they want.

Step 5: Provide Regular SEO Updates

Have a set of criteria to measure the success of your SEO. Read our article on the most essential SEO KPIs to get some ideas on what to focus on. Each month, go through the business website’s SEO and see how it’s performing in Google Analytics, SEMRush, and other search engine optimization monitoring tools. Also, let the business owner know what you’ve completed for the month, like if you created some content for a new service area page or wrote four blog posts for the website. You don’t want to leave the business owner hanging in the dark about what’s going on.

Summary

Hopefully, this article was useful in helping to present a stronger case to a business owner or CEO that SEO is important and that it’s worth it along with content marketing and social media marketing. Keep your explanations simple and never try to get too technical.

Always frame the argument in a relatable way and focus on helping the business owner reach their goals. If you’re interested in having our company perform a free SEO website audit, then call 470-440-3434 or email [email protected] today!